Two very large companies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, dominate the credit-rating industry. These two companies own around 80 per cent of the market. No other significant major competitors exist, though there are companies that rate local securities in places like China and India. In India,...

This dissertation includes three essays that consider the role of quality variation within agricultural production when consumers are heterogeneous in their preferences for quality. The first essay, 'The Welfare Benefits of USDA Beef Quality Certification Programs,' estimates the consumer...

Should arbitrators adjudicate on the basis of their own investigations, or invite the interested parties to make their cases and decide on the basis of the information so gathered? I call the former the inquisitorial procedure in arbitration and the latter the adversarial procedure. I conduct a...

The Medicare program, which provides insurance coverage to the elderly in the United States, does not protect them fully against high out-of-pocket costs. For this reason private supplementary insurance, named Medigap, has been available to cover Medicare gaps. This paper studies how Medigap...

The homogeneous sections method prescribed by the Plan comptable general (the French national accounting plan) since its origin is commonly attributed to the influence of the Rimailho Report (1928, in its final version). An in-depth analysis of the processes and management systems Rimailho set...

The current US IPO market is inefficient and unfair. To protect their own balance sheets, US investment banks systematically underprice offerings. To ration the cheap securities, the investment banks utilize various nefarious nonprice rationing techniques, including kickbacks. Regulators should...

The clear definition of property rights is not a sufficient condition to prevent congestion effects in commons. In this paper we present how interesting can be the coordination among owners in the preservation of the common good. Our approach takes into account economic dynamics and incentive...

This paper studies equilibria for economies characterized by moral hazard (hidden action), in which the set of contracts marketed in equilibrium is determined by the interaction of financial intermediaries. The crucial aspect of the environment that we study is that intermediaries are restricted...

A unique database on individual proposals is used to analyse competition among consulting firms (CFs) for international projects. CFs, which sell services based on human capital, focus on developing countries when operating abroad and, thereby, are highly dependent on development agencies (DAs)....

We propose a new explanation for price rigidity. We show that if consumers form habits in individual goods, then firms face a time- inconsistency problem. The consumers’ habits imply that low prices in the future help attract customers in the present. Firms would therefore like to promise low...